So I did the "fringe" poems and Gail did the "bling" poems and we wrote back and forth. We would pick up on subjects or terminology that the other would use and speak back to it. So they are fragmented, associative, using sound and wordplay....
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"Rem(ember) Me", "Holes/My Heart", "Shadow of a Skeleton" and "Holes/Windows" are from Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems), Los Angeles, CA: WhatBooksPress, 2009.
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Listen to/watch an interview with Bendall & Wronsky about Bling & Fringe.
Listen to/watch Bendall & Wronsky reading from Bling & Fringe.
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Gail Wronsky is the author of Poems for Infidels (Red Hen Press); Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon), a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Award; The Love-talkers (Hollyridge Press); Again the Gemini are in the Orchard (New Poets Series); and Dogland (Alderman Press, University of Virginia). Her translation of Alicia Partnoy's poems Volando Bajito has been published by Red Hen, and she is the coauthor with Molly Bendall of two books of "cowgirl" poetry: Calamity and Belle, A Cowgirl Correspondence and Dear Calamity, Love Belle. Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, a chapbook of poems about India where she lived for several months in 2006, has been published recently by Hollyridge Press.
Gail's poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Volt, Pool, Runes, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Laurel Review, Crazyhorse, Burnside Review, Lafovea, and Pistola. Her work has also appeared in anthologies, including Poets Against War (Nation Books), The Poet's Child (Copper Canyon), A Chorus for Peace (University of Iowa Press) and Grand Passion: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond.
Molly Bendall is the author of four collections of poetry, After Estrangement (Peregrine Smith, 1992), Dark Summer (Miami University Press, 1999, Ariadne's Island (Miami University Press, 2001), and Under the Quick (Parlor Press, 2009).
Her poems, reviews, and translations of the French surrealist poet Joyce Mansour have appeared in Paris Review, Field, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Pool and many other journals.
She has received the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared in anthologies: American Hybrid: The Norton Anthology of the New Poem, American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry, 2007, and The New American Poets.
She has also co-authored with poet Gail Wronsky two collections of "Cowgirl" poetry. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
